In the latest Forrester report about the state of Agile, “unplanned work” is cited as the biggest barrier in fully implementing an Agile approach:
To come across such ‘asteroids’ of unplanned work is not uncommon in Agile transformation. This is a fairly frequent tracking stage hiccup.
At the core program level execution, no scaling framework suggests metrics on tracking ‘Scope changes’ or team performance or spillover, etc. This is often restrictive for the RTEs, Business Owners, Program Managers, and/or other Program level roles who need to:
- Track the cross-ART progress
- Identify the blockers
- Monitor the scope changes made
- Find out the teams delivering as per the plan and identify those that are struggling
- Evaluate if the current feature slicing has been as required
- Compare the sprints for teams’ progress throughout the ART
- Manage unplanned work
- Keep abreast of the spillover in the here and now
Kendis Analytics module now provides a comprehensive, single-click, way to track the progress of the teams and features in your agile release train. The AI-driven mechanism actively learns and documents all the changes which are made either after the PI planning stage or have been introduced during the sprint executions throughout the PI. This end-to-end visibility of every single development at the ART makes the impact of scope changes on the total delivery value stream, not just predictable, but an extremely valuable insight to have.
Here’s what is happening (which you can check out for your own teams here).
With the new Analytics module at Kendis, users can:
1. Track PI progress, in terms of features, as well as teams
Instantly understand the scope changes (features added after planning) and their impacts on the team deliveries. This saves time and effort to track the progress of teams and features that have been planned during the PI Planning.
2. Examine Sprint performance
Compare ART efficiency throughout the Sprints, across three variables: Features; Stories; Story Points, to evaluate release orchestration performed by any team in each sprint.
3. View and evaluate the spillover
In real-world scenarios, spillovers, also known as carryovers, occur. Their frequency of occurrence can vary from company to company, but what remains consistent is the PO’s test to re-prioritize the stories in the new local context. Kendis furnishes the context for the spillover evaluation.
4. Manage unplanned work
Understanding the unplanned stories from a heap of features during PI planning is a serious challenge. With Kendis, you no longer need to browse through each feature to understand what is planned and what is left. This helps the RTEs and business owners to get a true picture of what is planned by the teams. We’ve explained in detail the unplanned work management through Kendis Analytics here.
5. Smell the rat, bell the cat – in time
With its streamlined, single-pane-of-glass unified view of the insights collected from across the entire organization, Kendis rings out the alarm bells much before you hit any iceberg, and helps you take mitigation actions before it’s too late.
Analytics at Kendis present complete information from your entire system while eliminating the noise. Your progress measurement has never been this sharp.
Try out the free 10-day trial, and see it for yourself.